open access linguistics

journals

This list aims to include all peer-reviewed platinum Open Access journals in general, descriptive, and theoretical linguistics, as long as they are open to submissions from anyone. Due to the fast-moving nature of the field it is likely to be constantly out of date. If you find that your favourite platinum journal is missing, that a link is broken, or that a detail is wrong, let us know on Twitter or by emailing George. The list was last updated in February 2018.

Journal in African Studies and Egyptology from University of Cologne. Multilingual, abstracts are welcome in German, English, French, Arabic and larger African languages. Full articles only in German, English or French though.

The longest-running publication devoted exclusively to the computational and mathematical properties of language and the design and analysis of natural language processing systems. Published by MIT Press.

Full financial support for this journal is provided by LingOA with long-term funding provided by the Open Library of Humanities (OLH). Sprung out of a disagreement between the linguists of Lingua and their publisher.

The Journal of Portuguese Linguistics is concerned with all branches of linguistics and aims at publishing high-quality papers in the field of Portuguese linguistics, including the comparison between any varieties of Portuguese and any other language(s). Part of LingOA.

Published by the Department of Language and Culture at UiT The Arctic University of Norway, and primarily features articles with some connection to UiT. Contributions are, however, welcome from others.

(Vestnik Rossiiskogo universiteta druzhby narodov) “The journal covers functional and socio-cognitive aspects of different languages and publishes a wide range of interdisciplinary studies that focus on the effect of sociocultural contexts on language development and use. This special approach allows the editors to publish research from a broad range of different linguistics subfields such as language and culture, comparative linguistics, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, cognitive linguistics, pragmatics, discourse analysis, intercultural communication, theory and practice of translation.”

The new Journal of Historical Syntax is fully Gold Open Access, with no charge to either authors or readers (sometimes called “platinum” or “diamond” OA). Alongside full-length peer-reviewed articles and squibs, the new journal will also host book reviews. It’s hosted by KIM at the University of Konstanz.

Caitlin Light has stepped down as editor, and the board would like to thank her for her hard work in managing submissions and raising the journal’s profile, as well as wishing her all the best for the future. George Walkden (AKA me) will carry on as editor-in-chief. Lauren Fonteyn (University of Manchester) and Marieke Meelen (University of Cambridge) are stepping up as editors, and Moreno Mitrović and Christina Sevdali have joined the advisory board.

The existing section of Language has closed its doors to new submissions, but there are still a number of papers in the pipeline, so keep an eye out there too! Once the one-year embargo has passed, all papers from Language will be republished on the new site, with the authors’ permission. All the old content from the journal’s 2011-2013 incarnation has been republished there as well. We’d like to thank the LSA, and in particular Greg Carlson and Andries Coetzee, for all their help and support over the years.

Our mission stays the same: to publish theoretically-informed and philologically rigorous papers in diachronic and historical syntax, with no bias as to framework. If you have any questions, or are thinking of submitting a paper, contact George, Lauren or Marieke or pester us on Twitter or Facebook and we’ll get right back to you!

On 11th October 2015, Lingua editor Johan Rooryck posted the following on his Facebook wall:

Last week, the editors of Lingua wrote a letter to Elsevier in order to renegotiate our collaboration. We asked for the following: 1) The journal is transferred to full Open Access status, 2) Article Processing Charges (APCs) cost 400 euros, 3) The copyright of articles remains with the authors, 4) The journal henceforth operates under a cc-by licence, 5) Ownership of the journal is transferred to the collective of editors at no cost. We define these conditions as Fair Open Access.
Should Elsevier not accept our conditions, we will be forced to set up a new linguistics journal elsewhere.

Such a move is now a real possibility thanks to a new organization called Linguistics in Open Access (Ling-OA) (http://www.lingoa.eu, website live tomorrow), Facebook: Linguistics in Open Access). Ling-OA is a non-profit foundation representing linguistics journals who wish to publish under the conditions of Fair Open Access. The journals LabPhon and Journal of Portuguese Linguistics have already decided to join this foundation.

Ling-OA has obtained financial guarantees to cover APCs for the first 5 years, provided by the Association of Dutch Universities (VSNU) and the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). It enjoys further support from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). The impact of the journals in transition will be monitored by CWTS Leiden (http://www.cwts.nl).

The journals will be published by Ubiquity Press with the Open Library of Humanities as a long-term sustainability partner. OLH, whose platform is also provided by Ubiquity Press, will guarantee the continued publication of the journals associated with LingOA after the first five years through its consortial library funding model. OLH is a charitable organisation dedicated to publishing Open Access scholarship with no author-facing APCs (https://www.openlibhums.org). This will provide long-term sustainability for Fair Open Access journals, ensuring that no researcher will ever have to pay for APCs out of their own pocket.

The Dutch universities have a strong preference for Gold OA and have been unable to reach agreement with Elsevier in negotiations, so are taking action. From the University of Tilburg’s website:

As a first step in boycotting the publisher, the Association of Universities in the Netherlands (VSNU) has asked all scientists that are editor in chief of a journal published by Elsevier to give up their post. According to the VSNU in daily NRC, the reactions varied from very willing to consider this to some reluctance.

A variety of linguistics journals are published with Elsevier, including the prestigious Lingua. It will be interesting to see how linguists respond to this call.

If you’re a linguist – any kind of linguist – then you, like me, will probably have received an email from the Open Journal of Modern Linguistics, inviting you to submit your work.

I’m extremely committed to open access in linguistics, and in academia more broadly; here’s why. But OJML is doing it wrong, and the rest of this post aims to explain why. The tl;dr list version of this post is as follows:

Don’t ever submit your work to OJML.

Tell your friends never to submit to OJML.

If you know someone who’s on the editorial board, gently ask them not to be.

So, what’s so very wrong with OJML? The short answer is that it is run by the wrong people and threatens to bring the entire, very promising, open access movement into disrepute by charging stupidly high APCs and skimping on quality both in terms of typesetting and intellectually.

The “costs” of progress: predatory publishers

Let’s take a look at OJML’s guidelines on Article Processing Charges (APCs). It’s $600 per article, but only if that article is within ten printed pages: in linguistics, that’s barely out of squib status. For each additional page above ten, an extra $50 is whacked on.

This may not seem like much, given that Elsevier charge up to $5000. But for a 20-page article, which is still short by linguistics standards, we’re talking $1100. Moreover, this kind of incremental model penalizes thorough argumentation and, in particular, proper referencing. It might even not be so bad if what you paid for was worth it – but I’ll argue below that it isn’t even close.

The open access community has a name for this kind of publishing practice: “predatory”. Jeffrey Beall maintains a list of predatory publishers on his website, along with criteria for inclusion. Surprise, surprise: “Scientific Research Publishing” (SCIRP), the publishers of OJML, are on the list at number 206.

What’s in it for them? Large amounts of money, made from academics’ naivety. Last year, journalist John Bohannon conducted a “sting” operation by submitting a series of 304 deliberately deeply flawed manuscripts by fictional authors to gold open access journals, many of them ostensibly peer-reviewed. More than half of them accepted the papers, including many that apparently sent the paper out for review, and 16 journals accepted the papers despite the reviewers spotting their damning flaws.

The journal Science, who hosted Bohannon’s piece, were keen to trumpet the failure of open access (unsurprisingly, as they represent the status quo that open access threatens). However, there are a lot of problems with Bohannon’s approach, which have been ably summarizedelsewhere. In particular, since Bohannon didn’t include a “control group” of traditional subscription journals, there’s no evidence that open access peer review practices are any worse than those. And even if they were, the existence of exploitative behaviour within open access of course doesn’t entail that open access itself is a bad thing. But it’s clear from Bohannon’s experiences and those of others that, where there are new ways of making shady money, there will be crooks who leap to seize them, and that gold open access (and OJML) simply illustrates one instance of this general principle.

Bad production standards

One of the areas where any publisher can claim to add value is in ensuring the formal quality of their published submissions: typesetting, copy-editing, proofreading, redrawing complex diagrams or illustrations, etc. If a publisher does this well, they may merit at least some of the fees that they typically charge for open access. However, OJML’s performance in this area shows that they hardly even look at the papers they publish. Here are some examples from Muriungi, Mutegi & Karuri’s 2014 paper on the syntax of wh-questions in Gichuka (which, at 23 pages, must have cost them a pretty penny):

Glosses are not aligned (e.g. in (6) on p2).

The header refers to the authors, ridiculously, as “M. K. Peter et al”.

There are clauses which contain clear typographical errors, e.g. “the particle ni which in Bantu, which is referred to as the focus marker”, on p3.

In (17), the proper name “jakob” is not capitalized.

There are spelling errors: “Intermadiate”, in table 1, p8.

The tree on p14 has been brutally mangled.

Some of the references are incomprehensible garbage: “Norberto (2004). Wh-Movement. http.www.quiben.org/wp.content/uploads”

A quick glance through any OJML paper will reveal that these aren’t isolated occurrences, and little of this is likely to be the fault of the authors: at least, any linguistically-informed copy-editor or proofreader should have picked up on all of these points instantly, and any proofreader at all should have picked up on most of them.

Low quality papers

What about the academic quality of the papers accepted? I don’t want to pick on any particular paper: in fact, I’m sure that there are nuggets of gold in there (the Muriungi et al. paper mentioned above, for instance, is a valuable syntactic description of an aspect of an understudied language). But I invite you to skim some of the papers and draw your own conclusions.

In particular, the dates of acceptance and revision of the papers aren’t exactly indicative of a thorough review process. For instance, the paper by Muriungi et al. was “Received 7 June 2013; revised 9 July 2013; accepted 18 July 2013”. Again, this isn’t unusual for the papers in this journal. It’s certainly not impossible for quality peer review to take place at this speed – and it’s certainly desirable to move away from the unacceptable slowness of some of the big-name journals – but it is at least doubtful. And one thing that is extremely eerie is howmanyofthearticlesaredatedashavingbeenrevisedexactlyonemonthafterreceipt, suggesting that the process may have been even shorter and that SCIRP is trying to cover itself, by means of outright lies, against exactly the kind of allegation I’m making.

The fields of linguistics given under their Aims & Scope don’t inspire confidence, either, with “Cosmic Linguistics” and “Paralinguistics” among them.

Why is this important?

OJML is symptomatic of exactly the wrong approach to open access. Open access, to me, is about disintermediation, about putting power back into the hands of academics. There are several good open access operators out there: Language Science Press is a prime example in the domain of books, the e-journal Semantics and Pragmatics has been performing a valuable no-fees open access service for years, and the Linguistic Society of America recently took a step in the right direction by making papers in its flagship journal Language openly accessible after a one-year embargo period. These initiatives are all run by researchers, for researchers.

In contrast, OJML is about opportunistic money-making. Here’s a quote from SCIRP’s About page, in relation to why their base of operations is in China while they’re registered as a corporation in Delaware: “What SCIRP does is to seize the current global trade possibilities to
ensure its legitimate freedom with regard to where to do what.” If this sort of creepy graspingness doesn’t put you off submitting to OJML, and the problems outlined in the previous sections don’t either, then I don’t know what will.

Unless we nip this problem in the bud, then it threatens to damage the reputation of the Open Access movement more generally. Time to boycott OJML, and to spread the word.

My little Journal of Historical Syntax has been in existence for a year and a half now. The Executive Committee of the LSA has requested some facts and figures on the eLanguage journals, and I thought that readers might be interested to see these numbers as well. Enjoy!

Since its inception in summer 2011, the Journal of Historical Syntax has received 13 submissions: 1 in 2011, 9 in 2012, and 3 so far in 2013.

Of those 13 submissions:

3 were rejected.4 were advised to revise and resubmit (of which 1 was subsequently accepted).4 were accepted with changes (plus the 1 mentioned above).2 are currently under review.

36 individuals have been involved in reviewing. The average time between receipt of the manuscript and date of the decision (not counting papers that were not sent out for review) is 97 days. 2 peer-reviewed papers have so far been published (1 in 2012, 1 in 2013). For these two, the times between receipt of the manuscript and publication were 275 and 187 days respectively. The articles have received 158 and 138 views respectively, and their abstracts have received 454 and 257 views respectively.

2 book reviews have also been published (1 in 2012, 1 in 2013), and a third is in the works. The two reviews have received 200 and 106 views respectively, and their abstracts have received 420 and 184 views respectively.